Loggers Used a Dead Man's Skull for a Ball Game — and Wrecked the Only Clue to a Wood Full of Skeletons
A week of horseplay in the timber near Newport has left the coroner unable to explain why one body after another keeps turning up in the same thicket.
The story, cleaned up
A cleaned-up reading of the newspaper page: spelling and layout repaired, one story lifted off a crowded page. It follows the original closely but it is not a transcription. The original page is below; read it if a detail matters.
SEATTLE, Feb. 12. — Because loggers near Newport played ball with the skull of a skeleton found in the woods a week ago, Coroner Snyder today is of the opinion that it might have proved a clue to the mysterious finding of several other skeletons in that region during the past year or more. The bones were discovered accidentally by the swampers while clearing out a roadway through a thicket, and, picking up the head, they strung it on a peavy and carried it into camp, where it was batted about indiscriminately and crushed by random blows.
“Picking up the head they strung it on a peavy and carried it into camp, where it was batted about indiscriminately and crushed by random blows.”
A century before forensic anthropology and DNA, a coroner's only evidence in an unexplained death was the skeleton itself — and here it was destroyed in an afternoon of camp horseplay. The story also records, almost in passing, that multiple unidentified bodies had already been found in the same patch of timber over a year or more, and that nobody had yet counted them as a pattern worth investigating.
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